Ben Kushigian: Music and math

Saturday

Jul 26, 2014 at 12:01 AM

By Joe Burns

Whether providing accompaniment for others or performing as part of an equal-partners group, guitarist Ben Kushigian’s musical skills are evident. At home in a wide range of genres, Kushigian is best known as a musician with an affinity for classic jazz.

Who are you playing with now?

I primarily play with Monica Rizzio, but I also play with a jazz trio, Matthias Bossi, he’s the drummer, and John Evens, he’s the bass player. It’s not too formalized. We were kind of joking around about (calling ourselves) the Cold Water Hot Club just because we do so much Django Reinhardt stuff. I guess that would be informally our name.

Reinhardt and his Quintette du Hot Club de France are famed for playing what’s known as gypsy jazz Does your trio focus on gypsy jazz?

There’s a thing with Hot Club style music and gypsy jazz -- you need a rhythm guitarist as well as a lead guitarist because it’s all about what the French call ‘la pompe,’ which is the rhythm guitar style in the background. Without that it’s hard to get the gypsy jazz sound, so a lot of times we’ll play classic swing or bebop. It all just depends on who’s on stage with me. But I do love gypsy jazz.

As I’m getting older I’m kind of gravitating more toward the bebop and old school swing. Gypsy jazz is great but it’s a killer on the wrist because you’ve got to play really fast all night long. It’s very intense. I kind of like the variety that more classic jazz offers.

Getting back to Monica Rizzio, and her band, Old Kings Highway, that’s more of an Americana group. How does your playing blend into that mix?

Essentially I try to bring western swing flavor into it. Sometimes it’s just straight country or bluegrass. The center is Americana and a country, bluegrass sort of thing and kind of draw from a couple genres outside of that.

Are you working on any projects?

I’m slowly working on my album. Catie (Flynn’s) written a couple of songs that we’re going to be doing on there. And we’ve gone into the studio to record one of them so far.

I’m going to be doing more classic swing, maybe some western swing. I’m trying to figure that out right now, because there’s some different things that I love, but I want to have something that stands on its own, it’s not segmented -- ‘here’s a bluegrass song, here’s a country song, here’s a rock song, here’s a jazz song.’ I’ll be mainly going with the trio I play with as far as the band goes. I may have (pianist) Fred Boyle come in on a track, I have couple of other musicians in mind.

You’re going to school to study math instead of music, why is that?

For a while I thought I was going to go to school for music and I was studying some counterpoint and harmony, and thinking about going to school for composure. I picked up Arnold Schoenberg’s book ‘The Theory of Harmony,’ and right off the bat - this is my favorite introduction that I’ve ever come across for music - he goes right into some of the science and the math of music.

Like we have the note and there’s an A four-forty, which means if you play A four-forty on your guitar the string vibrates 440 times in a second, 440 hertz, but not only does it vibrate at 440 hertz but there’s also a sub-vibration on the string that happens twice as often, 880 hertz, then there’s another sub-vibration that happens at 1320. And that goes all the way up past what we can actually hear.

That was what kind of got me into math. I started thinking and I was able to answer a question that I was wondering about for a couple of years: why the bass notes of pianos sound so muddled, it’s muddy and it’s kind of dissonant with itself where with a high note it’s nice and clear.

What that is is as you go up the progression of 440, 880, 1320, 1760, etc, that’s called the overtone series. And what you get are these fractions, like 440 to 880 is a one-to-two ratio, and 440 to 1320 is a one-to-three ratio. And the more complicated that fraction gets the more dissonant it is.

Since we can only hear up to a certain point that means that after a certain point we can’t hear any of those higher overtones, whereas on the low notes of a piano we can hear tons of them. That was my first scientific theory that I came up with. That was really exciting that I was able to explain something that I was wondering about through math. All of a sudden I realized, ‘wow, I love this. This is wonderful.’ And I was just obsessed with math.

When I started getting into math I thought to myself ‘maybe I could do this for a living.’ I love learning and there’s not the physicality. When I practice eight hours a day my wrists really start hurting me and I have to put the guitar down for a few days. If I study math for eight hours I might get a headache, but I wake up the next morning and I feel fine. So it suited me in a lot of ways.